Postscript
by Estoma
Summary: "The slanting handwriting proclaimed the author's name, and a postscript suggested a local park as a meeting place. The woman's hand closed slowly around the letter, and she crossed the room to the fire." Inspired by All Quiet on the Western Front. About two soldiers, unnamed and of no set nationality and the impact the death of an enemy has on one soldier.


**Author's note: Written as a college piece, and received an EA, so I really hope you guys enjoy this. It's about two unknown soldiers. No nationality, in world war one. Just wanting to highlight how all young men were really the same. Interestingly, there are no All Quiet on the Western Front related stories that I have found on here. Please feel free to review and let me know what you think.**

He pressed himself into the mud as if it were a lover, as if it were the only thing between him and certain death. In fact, it was. Around him was a jumble of sounds; the cacophany of battle, a staccato concert in shell fire. Now came the harsh sound of enemy voices. Hearing the guttural shouts in a foreign language, his heart sank; his only hope was for an attack by his comrades. Desperately he forced himself deeper into the mire. He rubbed against something solid. Disturbed by his movement, a hand floated to the surface of the muddy water. The uniform was identical to his own. Once he would have shied away from the corpse, but now it was merely part of the landscape he must use to ensure his survival. The soldier pulled the corpse over himself and waited, trying not to breathe. At the movement, a sharp pain coursed through his leg. The hastily applied dressing had barely stemmed the flow of blood for the shrapnel wound was deep.

His heart raced as if it sensed that death was close and strove to fulfil its quota of beats. He was cold, lying in the water, aware of the weight of the dead man on his back. Minutes passed. Hours passed. The battle field quietened. He moved the dead man off his back with difficulty; now there was hope a patrol from his own side may find him. With the absence of falling shells, the plaintive, desperate noises made by injured men became louder. German and English, they sounded the same. Agony was a universal language. It was a language he had come to know well for he had spent time in a field hospital. In the hospital, the surgeons were god. It was they who made the decision that sometimes it would be better for a man to die when he was brought in. Maybe they wanted to spare the suffering, or perhaps they needed the bed. His thoughts were dragged from the hospital to the nurses, and to one nurse in particular, his fiancée.

Her letter, he knew, was in the breast pocket of his tunic, and it was so creased and faded that he would scarcely be able to read it, under the flashes of the Verey lights. Still, his hand crept upwards and touched the pocket where the letter was kept. Thinking of her took his mind off the fear of imminent death, for it was impossible to imagine her crisp little uniform among this filth and blood. A rustle disturbed his thoughts as a rat scampered into the hole. He could hear it scratching, sinking its teeth into the corpse. The rats and lice were simply a part of the war, and a more pitiless enemy than the men in the opposite trenches. There had been a time when he was frightened of rats; an irrational fear of the small creatures in the attic and the cellar. They looked like mice when compared to these rabid foragers. There was the irony. While the soldiers grew thin, the rats grew fat, the factory owners grew rich, and the politicians and generals secured their places in history.

Yet he would have no more time to ponder for his life was to be ended- not quickly, nor cleanly- when an enemy soldier on patrol fell into his shell hole. It would take the soldier hours to die, but the official letter would tell of how he died bravely, killed in action. They would give no reason why a woman should be deprived of her beloved, nor a child of the father he would never know. No reason but meaningless phrases such as "sacred duty" and "to protect our country".

The crumpled letter, translated poorly from the enemy's language, told more. It arrived months later, with a stained pay book, and a letter that had been handled so many times that the sentiments of love were barely legible. It spoke of futility and brotherhood but these words were empty. It spoke of long, painful hours, of intestines lying in the mud like discarded sausages and those words were full. The author believed it was the right thing to do, that he was doing a kind thing, but it was also a selfish act, a confession and an outpouring to assuage his own grief. The money that began to arrive intermittently after a year did more to ease the grief of those left behind. Several times the author signed his name but always he scratched it out. It was as if revealing his name to the woman whose life he had destroyed with his bayonet, would make what he had done too painfully real.

Sometimes the author enclosed more than the money: he put his thoughts into words on the cheap paper. What are enemies? He asked, Why were we enemies? Your fiancé had no reason to harm me, and I had none to harm him. In his letters he told her of the dirty humour among the trenches, of the agony when he lost his eye to shrapnel, of putting survival above all else, of lying awake, questioning everything he did and everything he was told to do. 'Your fiancé, the war, it made me human, I don't know what I was before, but it made me human.'

After three years of letters the woman arrived home from her hospital shift to find her son holding a letter. The envelope had no stamp, nor an address, only a neatly printed name on the front. She asked where it had come from and her son replied that the pirate man delivered it. When she asked who the pirate man was, her son said that he had an eye patch and a strange accent and sometimes the man sat alone at the park and watched him play. The woman who was almost somebody's wife opened it, and her eyes flicked to the bottom. The letter was signed for the first time in three years. The slanting handwriting proclaimed the author's name, and a postscript suggested a local park as a meeting place. The woman's hand closed slowly around the letter, and she crossed the room to the fire.


End file.
